Solana
Basics * Whitepaper was published in 11-2017, 7-2018 the testnet was launched. Solana is open source. * Solana claims to be a scalable blockchain that utilizes proof of history to verify the ordering and passage of time between events. Its testnet consisted of a network of 200 physically distinct nodes which support a sustained throughput of more than 50,000 TPS.'' '' * Is preparing for Mainnet in Q3/Q4 2019 (planned timeframe as on 7-2019) * Published a piece explaining Proof of History and why that leads to super quick blockchains. "In short: communication overhead. Since Proof of History (PoH) provides a trustless sense of time and ordering of messages, network nodes can trust the relative message times that they receive in the PoH broadcast without having to communicate with all the other nodes in the network. For many distributed networks, the time to finality (the guarantee that past transactions on a digital ledger are legitimate and will not change) scales as the square or even the cube of the number of nodes in the system due to the necessity to confer with other network participants on message ordering. Because of our Proof of History implementation and our Avalanche communication design, Solana blockchain’s time to finality scales with the logarithm of the number of nodes. This translates into a high throughput network that can support tens of thousands of nodes, while retaining sub-second confirmation times." * Avalanche: "Avalanche is a method of organising the network data flow. The generator (leader) is at the top of the pyramid, with validators at each level below it. And for every additional level below the generator, the number of validators doubles. This enables Solana to scale their finality times logarithmically or log(n), where ‘n’ is the number of nodes. Typically, finality times on traditional gossip protocols scale at n squared, which means the finality times suffer exponentially as nodes increase on the network. However with Avalanche, the opposite occurs on Solana, thus supporting greater decentralization of nodes, while maintaining sub-second finality times." * Proof of Replication (PoRep): "Proof of Replication (PoRep) is a proof of storage protocol. And in our blockchain, it’s used for increasing availability, making it unnecessary for all nodes in the entire network to store the full ledger. It achieves this by ensuring that each bit of data has been replicated to it’s own uniquely dedicated physical storage node(s). In practical terms, it essentially allows the network to prove that a node you don’t trust is using its resources to store a segment of the ledger. This generates a torrent like network, where no single node is holding the full ledger, but a copy is always available on demand." * Consensus mechanism: Solana uses Proof of Stake (PoS) as its consensus mechanism. PoH allows Solana nodes to process the ledger optimistically, i.e. in terms of the CAP theorem Solana is an availability preferring system, and by leveraging validator vote lockouts that increase exponentially in time, Solana’s economic finality grows probabilistically with ledger depth. * Is openly against scaling through sharding: "We don’t believe in compromising security. Solana takes existing blockchain architecture and algorithms and improves on them instead of overlaying additional complexities such as sharding. We believe in it so much that we named our podcast #nosharding." * Wants to get into cloud storage and web services in the future. * Solana will be built with a LLVM front end, which means that any language supported by LLVM will be available to developers. The full suite of supported languages will be rolled out progressively, starting with C and C++. However, Rust will be the flagship language for Solana smart contract development. On ASIC's while using Proof-of-History "Isn’t every CPU different, and some much faster then others? How do you actually trust that “time” as it’s generated by our SHA256 loop is accurate? This topic deserves its own article, but long story short is that we don’t much care if some CPUs are faster then others, and if an ASIC can be faster then the CPUs available to the network. The most important thing is that there is a finite bound on how much faster an ASIC can get. We are using SHA256, and thanks to Bitcoin there has been significant research in making this cryptographic hash function fast. This function is impossible to speed up by using a larger die area, like a Look Up Table, or unrolling it without impact to clock speed. Both Intel and AMD are releasing consumer chips that can do a full round of SHA256 in 1.75 cycles. Because of this, we have pretty good certainty that a custom ASIC will not be 100x faster, let alone 1000x, and most likely will be within 30% of what is available to the network. We can construct protocols that exploit this bound and only allow an attacker a very limited, easily detected and short lived opportunity for a denial of service attack." Team * "comprised of pioneering technologists from Qualcomm, Intel, Netscape, and Google" * Anatoly Yakovenko; CEO "Anatoly is the creator of Solana. He led development of operating systems at Qualcomm, distributed systems at Mesosphere, and compression at Dropbox. He holds 2 patents for high performance Operating Systems protocols, was a core kernel developer for BREW which powered every CDMA flip phone (100m+ devices), and led development of tech that made Project Tango (VR/AR) possible on Qualcomm phones." * Greg Fitzgerald; CTO, "Greg is the principal architect of Solana. Formerly of Qualcomm's Office of the Chief Scientist, Greg has explored the full landscape of embedded systems. He created a bidirectional RPC bridge between C and Lua for the BREW operating system, helped launch the ARM backend for the LLVM compiler toolchain, and published a variety of open source projects including a streaming LLVM optimizer in Haskell, license analysis tooling in Python, and a reactive web framework in TypeScript. If you have time to burn, ask him "Why Rust?" We dare you." * Raj Gokal; COO "Raj leads operations, product, and finance. He has spent 10 years in product management and finance. He was a venture investor at General Catalyst, started the consumer medical device company Sano which attracted over $20m in investment, and led product management at Omada Health as it grew tenfold." * Eric Williams; Chief Scientist, "Eric heads data science and token economics. He studied particle physics at Berkeley and received his PhD from Columbia while Higgs hunting at CERN. He completed a postdoc in Medical Physics at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and later led data science at Omada Health." * Andrew Hyde; Community Investors * Raised $20 million in a Series A round led by Multicoin Capital, with participation from Distributed Global, Blocktower Capital, Foundation Capital, Blockchange VC, Slow Ventures, NEO Global Capital, Passport Capital and Rockaway Ventures. * On why Multicoin invested: "Solana is the closest thing to the ‘world computer’ blockchain developers conceptualized in the early days of crypto,” explains Kyle Samani, Cofounder and Managing Partner of Multicoin Capital. “While many developers have proposed sharding solutions for scaling existing layer 1 solutions, all of those solutions introduce a tremendous amount of complexity and create new user experience problems. Solana has done it differently — and is one of the most compelling layer 1 platforms we’ve evaluated to date. We’re very proud to lead this round, and we encourage developers everywhere to take a serious look at Solana.” Category:Coins/Tokens